Just starting blacksmithing

[slifox]

Just starting out on sourcing objects to start a setup that will progress with time and dive into smithing. Ive always had the idea to start up blacksmithing but just never had the time (work, kids, funds)

I'm a long time lurker of many forums and video content on youtube. I just thought i might start documenting my start-up for constructive criticism and possible slaps to the face while i make some dumb mistakes.

Here is what ive sourced so far

1 - 14" x 18" 2" thick plate (120lbs roughly) unknown low quality steel. possible laminated anvil setup for knife making and who know possibly a short sword or two.

1 - 7" diameter x 24" (180lbs roughly) hydraulic hammer bit for breaking rocks. most likely my starter anvil and possibly a cold steel hammering surface for misc Armour making once i build my plate anvil.

1 - 18" diameter 3/4" thick 26" (from dome to dome) wall pipe with 1 welded dome end cap and one loose dome end cap. once i build the burners (thinking more like hybridburners type of setup) i was thinking 2 burner setup with 3 inch total thickness insulation (1" kawool ) and a firebrick strip laid down for metal running across.

i will start building burners soon and will post pictures as i go.

 

[ThomasPowers]

Please don't spend many many hours making a sword from steel that I would bet wouldn't harden!

[Buzzkill]

Welcome to the forum.  First, if you'll take the time to update your location in your profile you may find someone close by who can help you get started on your journey.

For your 2 inch thick plate, it will work best as an anvil if you place it on edge with the 18 inches vertical.  The more steel directly under your hammer blows, the better it will help you move metal.  2 inches is a little thin, but it only needs to be as wide as your hammer face to get full effect.  Sometimes for knife making a narrower anvil is better anyway.

The hydraulic hammer bit sounds like a sweet item for a post anvil.

Your pipe for a propane forge is overkill by an order of magnitude at least.  18 inches in diameter at 3/4 inch thick and 26 inches long is quite heavy to begin with.  Next you'll need to calculate your volume after lining it to figure out how many burners of which diameter you'll need to heat that monster.  It's pretty hard to work on more than 6 inches or so of metal at a time before it cools to the point where it needs to be put back into the fire.  Your proposed forge will use a LOT of propane to keep it hot and the reality is most of it will be completely wasted.

Your enthusiasm to get started beating on hot metal is understandable and it is addictive for most of us here.  However, you seem to be falling into the trap that a lot of us did when starting up.  It's easy to get caught up wanting to go big and best before we even really know what will work for us. 

I hope you'll take some time to pull up a chair, some snacks, and a cold beverage and read at least the pinned and sticky posts at the top of the sections that apply to your interests.  Based on your post I'd recommend hitting the gas forge section and the intro to knife making/knife making classes for a start.  You'll find that a fair amount of material on here may contradict what you've seen on YouTube and some other sources.  The main difference is a lot of the regular posters on here are experienced smiths whose work speaks for itself, some have written books on their areas of interest, and the community here will usually quickly correct erroneous information.

[51 Papy]

Slifox

The hammer bit will make a heck of a post anvil.  Put at least a third to one half of it a base and put sand around it.  That will cut the ring down to a manageable level.  Mine has about 90% rebound and works well for what I do.  

Papy

[Frosty]

Welcome aboard Slifox, glad to have you. Don't get too carried away in the beginning, it's just WAY too easy to build bigger than you can use let alone need. Do some reading in the forge section to get an idea of what guys are using for what type work.

Frosty The Lucky.

[slifox]

I guess i forgot to mention that the items i have acquired were all free, I have ran figures on rough interior of the forge and i've been in a debate for leaving off the other dome and come up with roughly 900 cubic inches which i understand in a bit much, but it was free and i have 100lb propane cylinders.

I have looked into the possibility of just making a small forge to start with and one burner. I could always hold off on the large guy and turn him into a foundry when i start making bronze.

I appreciate the coming back to reality comments, its why i'm here

the 2 inch plate was going to be an inverted anvil till i came across the post anvil. I'm going to hang onto it and possibly trim a 4" piece off the 18" and either heat treat that to be applied to the 2" face or just make a laminate anvil with some heavy heavy welds (from a 400+ amp welder which might ruin temper) or  without heat treat just hard face it with some stick welds and machine mill it down.

One thing i do have is access to supplies maybe just not always the right ones

Thomas Powers, if my information serves me correct all steel can be hardened, just some not as well as others. Also with homebrew (another passion of mine making mead) its all about process.

[ThomasPowers]

It's only free if it comes with free propane!  Would you use a dump truck as a commuter car cause it was free, you only have to pay $50 a day more for the gas it uses compared to a regular vehicle?

[Buzzkill]

Hmm.  You might want to check your calculations.  Based on what you told us you'll end up with a 12 inch diameter chamber after adding your lining.  The radius squared times pi times the 26 inch length is more like 2940 cubic inches unless I did my math wrong.  If I did my math right that would require 8 to 9 three fourths inch diameter burners to keep hot.  It will also require a lot more kaowool and refractory to line that beast.  The point is you're planning to spend WAY more money up front AND way more money to operate it than needed by a very wide margin.  My advice is to hang on to that pipe for some other project and scale your propane forge down to BBQ tank size or smaller until you know what you really want/need.

[Buzzkill]

I didn't subtract any length for the refractory on the 2 ends, but lets assume you decrease the length of the chamber by 4 inches on each end due to refractory and the curvature of the domes.  That still leaves you with 18 inches in length and over 2000 cubic inches of chamber to heat, requiring about 6 three-fourth inch burners to bring up to temperature and keep it there.

[Frosty]

Check out Mike Porter's latest thread, "Forges 101" he's addressing most of the issues you need to consider. He's just starting it off right now but will be getting to the meat of the subject. Those of us who've been building and using the thing a while can find it hard to think about some of these basic issues. It's good for us to try explaining them it makes us think about the "whys" of things we've just been doing instead of thinking about.

Unless you're building a furnace for a commercial forging operations there's little you can do with that beast but feed it, even as a melter it's inappropriate. All the insulation you can stuff into it will still result in burning a lot of fuel heating the shell. One of the guys in our club is a bronze caster and runs a couple annual iron pours none of his melters has more than a sheet steel shell.

On the rare occasions I've run all four, 3/4" burners on my WAY too large, shop forge it will chill a 100lb. tank enough to start forming shlush in about 3 hrs. Trying to run 8-9 would have one freezing up in under an hour.

Frosty The Lucky.

[slifox]

the dome caps are around 6"  depth each, so chamber would be roughly 5.25 radius x 16" height without one dome cap and insulating both ends makes for roughly 1385 cubic inches. Then i have some displacement for the fire brinks as well which 9x 4.5 x 1.25 roughly minus 100 cubic inches. not my same figures as before because a accidentally did a different radius of 4.25 with 4" thick insulation wall. humm i shouldn't think about projects while working

Thomas i get your thought process i guess i will throw the large pipe to the side and just search for a 8"-10" pipe.

frosty i will have to check that out while i'm chewing on some lunch!

[Buzzkill]

Ahh, so the diameter you gave us was the outside diameter.  On the fire bricks I'm not sure you should subtract them from your calculations.  If they are inside the insulation then they will be part of the forge that needs to be heated - and full size normal fire bricks are big time heat sinks.  However, once they have absorbed the heat they will help radiate heat back into the forge.  Frosty or Mikey might have a better idea if they should be excluded from volume calculations for the purpose of determining how many burners you need.  Regardless, it sounds like you're willing to abandon the behemoth pipe idea and travel down a more economical path, so kudos and good luck.

[slifox]

Here is my little post anvil before I decide how to mount it upright. Also my little slab I'm assuming it's pretty low grade steel since we cut that with a circular saw made for steel cutting 1 inch depth at a time and was pretty easy.

[Frosty]

You WANT to make a forge 10.5" dia x 16" high? Is there a reason you want a vertical cylinder forge or are you thinking of it as a melter instead?

If you're dead set on a cylindrical forge that humongus buy a 24" piece of 10" ungalvanized stove pipe. A couple wall hangers make your legs and a couple more make your burner mounts. For tools you'll need a hand drill and bits, pop rivets and puller or sheet metal screws and driver, tin snips and a fine file or sand paper to clean off sharp edges.

Trim the pipe to length and put it together, it's fast easy and requires pretty basic shop skills. Stove pipe on the supports designed to hold it is easily up to holding a couple hundred lbs. of stock in it. Once lined with a couple inches of ceramic blanket and half an inch or so of hard refractory plastered or cast for the inner liner it's ready to dry, cure and use. Best of all, you can screw or pop rivet ONE handle on top of it and carry it in one hand. . . . Detach the propane hose first.

Stand the plate on edge and take a look at Brian Brazeal's anvils for outstanding ways to make it a high performer. The hammer will make a dandy anvil.

Frosty The Lucky.

[slifox]

I really can make any forge size at the moment, i'm not set on anything. the pipe was something i just came across and snagged up from a friend.

now that people have got me scratching my head more about forge design i wouldn't of thought about thermal mass playing a big role in the design.

the stove pipe make sense since a class A pipe has dual layers but is the dual layer needed? a class B is just a single layer, i would image this would function just as well.

I did like the idea on the brazeal style anvils but my plate is way to soft to use in its current state and i wouldn't have anything to heat it up a 14" x 18" x 2" plate let alone to cool it well enough to get a decent harden anvil.

my post anvil will serve a decent ASO for a good amount of time.

Frosty i can't fathom a different style of a forge than a cylindrical shape horizontal in orientation. Now me not being an expert would imagine the shape paired with a slight angle of burner to allow mild rotation of flame and perhaps more even heat. i guess the struggle would be the balance of even heat (more fuel and time) vs hot spot quicker to anvil time.

I will keep lurking some of the newer forge treads for more ideas.

thanks for the input i'm sure to be distracted all day at work now

[ThomasPowers]

1: Your plate, if it's steel, is probably the same hardness, (barring work hardening),  as his plate is.  Hot steel is softer.

2: Unless it's an alloy with appreciable carbon content in it heating it up and quenching WON'T HARDEN IT!  Please ignore what Hollywood shows, what poorly researched fantasy books tell, if it's not a proper alloy it won't harden---in fact some alloys will soften if you heat them up and quench them in water as you will lose any work hardening and not gain any quench hardening. (very low carbon alloys for instance)

[slifox]

honestly im unsure on the plate what exactly it is, im leaning towards it being steel. it dents pretty easily, but im kinda putting the plate on the back burner and going to using the post anvil and just use the plate to flatten at most or light hammering. Yes i will use this on end.

Like i stated ive been lurking subjects on smithing for almost a year, and knew the anvil or ASO was the hardest thing to find for something decent everything else was just a matter of building. only thing i haven't spent time on researching till as of late was forge design.

mainly spent sourcing metals types and anvils and parts for making burners.

I will be honest thomas this is why i was debating just hard-face welding the plate.

if your working with steel(which is an alloy) and it happens to be low carbon you can just case harden (not expecting higher grade steel hardness) or jacket with a higher grade ,or i could just be naive.

[ThomasPowers]

Case hardening is an extremely thin surface layer that is used to increase wear life it's not any good for impact.  "jacketing", do you mean forge welding a higher carbon steel to it?  Yes and it was commonly done historically; nowadays with the massive amounts of cheap high grade steels available it's generally not done as not being cost effective and taking high skills to do it.  Where it's still done is in historical replicas, bragging rights pieces and blades where the method and results play a part that may ignore costs...

Hard facing can help but is expensive and you have to get the RIGHT STUFF for hardfacing, many commonly used rods are for abrasion resistance and not for impact where for an anvil you worry more about impact and less about abrasion resistance.

[slifox]

some stoody 1105's can be a decent rod for 70 bucks for 10lbs but before i go that route id rather use my post anvil and see what comes up for a real anvil before i put forth the effort. 

[Frosty]

The ONLY thing a gas forge shell does is contain the refractory and support the work, using double or triple wall stove pipe is wasting money, like buying racing tires for the Civic, zero benefit.

Imagine a capital D flat side down and you have a cross section of a vault shaped forge. This has a number of advantages the most obvious being a flat floor with a LOT more area to work on.

Brian's anvils are not hardened steel, they're generally mild. He ONLY works HOT on it so it doesn't make a lot of difference. Case hardening is a complete waste of time and money. for what it'd cost to case harden that plate you could buy a darned nice modern anvil.

Hard facing isn't going to do a lot of good either even if you use a steel on stone facing rod. What you're trying to prevent is deformation under the hammer, you may not know it but that's the ONLY reason for hard anvil faces. Unfortunately hard facing rod is brittle and has almost no bridging strength. This means if the metal under it can give the hard face will start cracking under hammer blows.

To prevent cracking and spalling under impact is why I recommend guys wanting to hard face their anvils use a proper build up rod first to provide an unyielding surface for the hard facing. To get a handle on how this works imagine laying a sheet of glass on a clean table then press on the center as hard as you can with your finger. It won't break. However if you lay the same sheet of glass on a piece of foam rubber it hardly takes any pressure to break it. The glass is brittle and has little if any bridging strength but it has enormous compression strength. So as long as it's supported rigidly it can take all but inhuman pressures.

Stoody 1105 CAN? be decent rod? It's GOOD rod, do you know what for?

You don't need a horn to turn scrolls, rings, hooks, etc. it's just a matter of technique.

You are getting WAY ahead of yourself here and you're wasting a lot of good hammer time trying to understand things you really can't without knowledge and hammer time. You're guessing about improving things that are fine as they sit. Relax, build a fire and have some fun. Tweak and make better tooling when you know how it works and what you need.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Chris Williams]

 

http://victortechnologies.com/IM_Uploads/DocLib_7465_2102A_Stoody_HardfacingHighAlloyCatalog.pdf

Look at the charts that the manufacturer provides when selecting rods or wire. You won't be happy with the results for the cost of using the Stoody 1105.

"Applications: Non-lubricated 
metal-to-metal rolling or sliding 
parts where temperature can be 
a factor such as steel mill rolls 
and undercarriage parts of earth 
moving equipment." The abrasion resistance AND impact strength are listed as "low" (relative values) for this rod. 

You want one with a longer black line on the above chart. 

[Steve Sells]

On 7/27/2016 at 11:20 AM, slifox said:

 if my information serves me correct all steel can be hardened, just some not as well as others. Also with homebrew (another passion of mine making mead) its all about process.

you are incorrect.  Steel can only be noticeably hardened if there is sufficient carbon present in the steel matrix to form martentite.  We have entire sections devoted to heat treating I suggest you read more there, too much to repeat.  

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